Floridity [POEM]
You’ll get over it, you always do, and don’t give me that
not this time crap because you always do. It’s kind of annoying, actually,
how many times you have gotten over it, and we haven’t even reached floridity yet.
We’re still, unsuccessfully, having a conversation. Stop stalling, or your trauma
will have itself a fully developed brain before you commit to coping—and then, well, who knows?
Too late, lost cause? Game over?
I get it. When we adjust the phrasing,
it comes out too multifaceted; the print is just a little bit too
off,
only a little jarring,
only a little jarring of my soul to sit out on your shelf,
but we won’t go there yet, we can still adjust the text, polish
it up,
sell the story. When we fix it up, tune it into another frequency
&
unravel its familiarity into some unmusical instrument strung
with severed cords,
it does not have two contrasting definitions, it reads
we cannot get endure this & remain.
Wake up! You’ve been in a coma for twenty years,
and while you were out your entire family died in a fire and
also
there was a zombie apocalypse and also
all the birds disappeared and the outdoor silence is too over-
whelming now.
Some say if you lean into the absence far enough you can hear
the answer to every dilemma
the universe will ever etch up for you, but I’m just not very
superstitious. Besides, I think we’re just unsewable, anyway,
too thick to penetrate. Wake up, please.
For the love of God, wake up. In the name of God, wake up. I’ll
do anything. I’ll
embrace the floridity if it gets you to bring her back. So I can’t
control myself anymore—
so what? They pre-planned the excavation, made a whole
binder
and everything, cremation orchestrated
down to the last tabbed & laminated page. It was always
going to happen like that. I’ll do anything, I’ve embraced it.
I’ll do anything,
I’ll even ask the Unspeakable Horror to move if it’s still alive,
and then I’ll ask
the Unspeakable Horror a favor, and then I will tell the
Unspeakable Horror every truth
the universe will ever etch out for me— see, I’m selfish and I
know too much and I see what
cannot be seen—and I know the Unspeakable Horror will
never love me back—
there will be no grand union-decimating gestures even if the
delusion sounds convincing
when I’m off my meds—
I probably shouldn’t call it or you an Unspeakable Horror,
but what else is there to call the haunting? I’m sorry, it’s just
all too much, it’s just all blurring together. I can’t say it. I’m
a child’s rhyming poem, or you are: Unspeakable Horror #1
holding hands with Unspeakable Horror #2,
swirling in circles on the playground, overjoyed. In the
original tale, if you look closer, between the texts—if you read
too much into it like you are so very skilled at doing—-
they’re not dancing, they’re actually sparring. The first
Unspeakable Horror has a knife to
its counterpart’s chest. The second Unspeakable Horror is
planning another heist. It’s
going to strike soon and then I don’t know what will happen,
I can’t see that well. All I know is that
one of my inner worlds wants me to adore it all,
even if it hurt, a cinematic extracted torture scene,
but I’m only halfway there. I’ve completed every level
& now here is the last battle: I am just too good at adoring the
beautiful parts, because it is so easy
to adore the horrors when they take on that particular false
frame, the daydream
I’m devouring, and I am not very good at adoring the unsightly
parts,
the ones they sent back to the creator. I don’t think anyone is
good at that part. Go ahead and prove me wrong.